“Well,” Martin demanded.  “Out with it.”

“I had that door painted only last week,” Mr. Higginbotham half whined, half bullied; “and you know what union wages are.  You should be more careful.”

Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of it.  He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the wall.  It surprised him.  He had always liked it, but it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time.  It was cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house.  His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw, first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving.  He forgot where he was and Bernard Higginbotham’s existence, till that gentleman demanded:-

“Seen a ghost?”

Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent, cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below—­subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.

“Yes,” Martin answered.  “I seen a ghost.  Good night.  Good night, Gertrude.”

He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the slatternly carpet.

“Don’t bang the door,” Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.

He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed the door softly behind him.

Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.

“He’s ben drinkin’,” he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper.  “I told you he would.”

She nodded her head resignedly.

“His eyes was pretty shiny,” she confessed; “and he didn’t have no collar, though he went away with one.  But mebbe he didn’t have more’n a couple of glasses.”

“He couldn’t stand up straight,” asserted her husband.  “I watched him.  He couldn’t walk across the floor without stumblin’.  You heard ’m yourself almost fall down in the hall.”

“I think it was over Alice’s cart,” she said.  “He couldn’t see it in the dark.”

Mr. Higginbotham’s voice and wrath began to rise.  All day he effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the privilege of being himself.

“I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.”

His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation of each word like the die of a machine.  His wife sighed and remained silent.  She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband.

“He’s got it in him, I tell you, from his father,” Mr. Higginbotham went on accusingly.  “An’ he’ll croak in the gutter the same way.  You know that.”

She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching.  They were agreed that Martin had come home drunk.  They did not have it in their souls to know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and that glowing face betokened youth’s first vision of love.